Soulless

We lose the ones we love everyday. Like a river eroding the bed below, shaping and smoothing the stones that lie under, so too do we, each day, erode a layer of our love, hope and dreams.

Each unspoken word, every feeling hidden away in the depths of our hearts, every emotion we won’t accept takes us one step closer to an emotional death that leaves us cold, hard, or worse, soulless.

The glance to the door when we’re expecting someone, the constant, repetitive checks on your phone to see if you’ve missed that call or message, the thousand curses when they’re late by five minutes, all is wound down to nothing, played down as if it never were. “I wasn’t waiting for you,” we say, when our heart has been burning for hours. We act as though we don’t care, we act like we don’t want them, we hold ourselves in, and lock ourselves in the prisons of our hearts behind walls so high and thick nothing could ever break through.

We do things on purpose that others may find out ‘by accident’. We hide our emotions to save face, to stay safe. Often we don’t say what we want to, hoping that the other will understand, or worse, that they won’t. We drop subtle hints to the fact that we don’t care, but they become glaring suggestions to the fact that we do. Most of us do not notice that those we think hate us the most actually love us and those we hope and think love us may not like us at all.

We hide behind a curtain of lies, a façade, a mask of cold detachment. We hope that we may appear strong, but only we know that we lean upon this wall within us. To others we appear strong, well supported, when actually, we are crumbling within, just like the cracked, plastered paint of the prisons we build for ourselves inside our hearts, hidden from view.

We don’t tell the ones that we appreciate nearly enough that we do. We act as though things that can break us do not matter. We force things to fit into the block shapes of our perceptions simply because we cannot accept that which we cannot understand. Simply put, we only see what we are expecting to see simply because we want to see nothing else.

I say all this today purely because we live in a world with a distorted understanding of the concept of love. Today, love is a rush, a high, not of the mind or heart or indeed, as it should, the soul, but of the flesh. For a moment of glory, which we cannot fully understand, we tie deadweight to our hearts and toss them into the lifeless black hole of momentary existence. What most of us do not understand is that intercourse is different from making love. That pleasure which the flesh gives us is not even a fraction, a glimpse of what love can show us. The carnal pleasures of the flesh would multiply manifold when they become more than just the fusing of two bodies, but the fusing of two minds, two hearts, entwined, combined as two lovers hold hands, fingers intertwined.

We are afraid to cry, afraid of what others will think of our moments of weakness. However, these are not what we think them to be, our lowest, weakest moments, but, in fact, our shining moments of strength. For these brief moments when the heart bleeds, the soul comes up to the surface; for these precious moments, we have lost all fears, all boundaries imposed on us by men weaker and more cowardly than us, all imaginary lines drawn in our minds by those before us. For those few moments, frozen in time, but molten in our hearts, we are not lying to others or ourselves. Indeed, we appear on the outside, for these scant moments, to be who we really are.

It is these moments that open the doors to our hearts, and allow our souls to permeate through the depths, the darkness of the layers, masks, covers, façades and lies that we hide under. It is not unlike the tide, wave after wave of lies coming further and further up the shore, splashing against the rocks, but we ignore the spray. And the waves conquer, moving forward further and further till the sands of our lives, indeed, the very essence of who we are is all but gone, washed away or hidden beneath the breakers. But then the tide recedes, and we are left naked, for all the world to see. Indeed, we are no longer who we thought we were, for a layer of the sands of our lives has been washed out to sea, never to return. Those shells that we had buried in these sands, never to be seen by others, now lie bared, as their protective walls lie crumbling around them, some in ruins, and others completely washed away.

Each tear that runs down our cheek is like a sediment deposited on this beach, a new pebble formed, a new rock by the shore. They add to who we are, and what we make of ourselves. Those of us that are afraid to cry are indeed afraid to live. Afraid, not as we may think, of others, of society, but of ourselves, and that we may actually have the capacity to love. It is sad that that which makes us the most alive, the most strong, the most true, honest and open, a builder of character and life is considered to be our liability, our weakness.

Those who are afraid to cry are indeed afraid to love. Love opens the doors to the soul, just like every tear, allowing our spirit to roam free, to roam the earth around us as it was meant, freeing it from the shackles of our minds, no longer prisoner to our ambitions. Life has taught us that what is good is bad, and what is bad is good. We all continue to live our lives without the proverbial ‘Fountain of Youth’ of the soul, the secret of its immortality, tears.

And we all believe this to be the ‘normal’ way of life, socially acceptable, and therefore, the right path to be taken. We do not for a moment consider if those fools before us might have gotten it wrong. Maybe life isn’t just a race to the finish, but a journey to be enjoyed with each other’s company. Maybe crying is not what posterity has told us it is, but a way to touch The Source. And maybe, just maybe, we should learn to open our hearts and love instead of opening our bodies and slowly killing our souls.